Monday, February 27, 2012

Out here in California we're having what an optimist might call a "mild
winter." In a more pessimistic assessment, we could be heading for
another drought year.

In the middle of last week a friend posted a
lovely photo on Facebook of a sight I had the pleasure to witness on my
bike ride home from work: a crystal-clear sky at the cusp between
twilight and full-on night, moon diminished to a near-expired crescent,
Jupiter and Venus brightly aligned above.

This is a great week around the world to watch the sunset. MSNBC posted an article Saturday, 4 planets & moon dominate weekend night sky,
with a similarly gorgeous photo taken in Mooresville, North Carolina.
Catching the sight live here on the Left Coast was breathtakingly
beautiful, as our sky is frequently in the Bay Area. Makes a person
grateful both for the lovely place we inhabit and for senses to take it
in.

In
the moment it's easy to relish our sunny days, our nightscapes, the
blooming plums and cherries that stay brightly flowered for weeks on end
in the absence of rain to wash their petals to the ground. It would be
churlish not to be grateful for these pleasures.

Mild winters in California don't
imply there won't be a reckoning. Near term, if and as last year's
generous precipitation runs out of the state's reservoirs, we'll once
again face rationing. But greater reckonings lurk ahead, as the slow
swings of weather patterns make it harder and harder for humans to live
as densely as we do here on the rim of the Pacific Ocean (and elsewhere
on the planet too, perhaps sooner and more dramatically there than
here).

Thanks to dogenfrost for his lovely photo, shared via Flickr and Facebook, of the night sky on 23 Feb 2012 seen from the Berkeley Hills; and to Matthew Felix Sun for permission to use his photo of the heavens through the trees, taken from our back porch on 25 Feb 2012.

In
historical events what is most obvious is the prohibition against
eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Only unconscious activity
bears fruit, and a man who plays a role in a historical event never
understands its significance. If he attempts to understand it, he is
struck with fruitlessness.

Now I do find myself caught up in
the great man's theories. Dressed up as they are with his vividly drawn
supporting arguments -- a.k.a. his portrayal of Napolean's invasion of
Russia in the early 19th century -- Tolstoy's ideas about history look
pretty convincing as one steps through the twelve-hundred-plus pages of War and Peace.

Tolstoy
scorns "great man" accounts of historical movement. For pages and pages
he argues that neither Napolean's decisions nor the stratagems of his
generals had much to do with the outcomes of skirmishes, battles, or
even the war itself.

But it's hard to reconcile this emergent view of historical influence -- Only unconscious activity bears fruit -- with modern means of communication. There's a certain antiquity in play here: War and Peace
is a novel about Imperial Russia fending off an invasion by a
self-declared monarch, a European upstart. Nobody had televisions or
radios, let alone cell phones.

Martin Luther King Jr. didn't have a cell phone either, but watch a recording of his 1963 "I have a dream" speech and tell me this man failed to understand his own historical significance:

I didn't think you would.

Here's Tolstoy making his point, from a couple of hundred pages earlier still in War and Peace (Vol III - Part Two - Chapter 25):

"However they say he's a skilled commander," said Pierre.

"I don't understand what is meant by a skilled commander," Prince Andrei said mockingly.

"A
skilled commander," said Pierre, "well, he's one who has foreseen all
possibilities ... well, who has guessed the thoughts of his adversary."

"That's impossible," said Prince Andrei, as if the matter had long been decided.

[...]

"[...] Success never did and never will depend on position, or on ammunition, or even on numbers; but least of all on position."

"But on what then?"

"On the feeling that's in me, in him," he pointed to Timokhin, "in every soldier."

There's
something compelling about Prince Andrei's argument. What would it
matter how regiments are arrayed if the soldiers who constitute them are
afraid, or indifferent, or debilitated by hunger or cold?

We could even leave aside the question of wars and regiments.

Take
the current struggle for position to lead the G.O.P. presidential
ticket come November's election. A few days ago Timothy Egan wrote a
piece published on the NY Times website, The Electoral Wasteland.
The numbers he throws around look pretty suspect to me ... where
convenient, he measures number of voters participating in a Republican
primary with the number of "total registered voters, of all political persuasions." Still. Let's take a look at this bit from Egan's post:

So
far, three million voters have participated in the Republican races,
less than the population of Connecticut. This means that 89 percent of
all registered voters in those states have not participated in what is,
from a horse-race perspective, a very tight contest.

Yes, we
know Republicans don’t like their choices; it’s a meh primary. But
still, in some states, this election could be happening in a ghost town.
Less than 1 percent of registered voters turned out for Maine’s caucus.
In Nevada, where Republican turnout was down 25 percent from 2008, only
3 percent of total registered voters participated.

G.O.P.
leaders appear to think they are leading, or at least they're trying
hard to project an illusion to that effect. They and their super-PACs
are certainly collecting piles and piles of money to fund a malicious
and unhinged campaign, one that has little to do with reality and loads
to do with rhetoric. In response, the Republican rank and file appear to
be shrugging their shoulders and turning their backs. Where is all this
headed? Looks to me like an hysterical fringe is well-positioned to
pick the G.O.P. ticket, and thereby to hand President Obama a second
term ... on a Tea Party platter.

We have another nine months
before this prediction plays out, one way or another. But if the G.O.P.
fringes its way to flaming defeat we'll have a 21st century example of
an historical outcome having nothing to do with positions staked out by
leaders, but instead one that is determined by the states of mind and
heart among the rest of us.

What do you think?

Is world
history shaped by the decisions of leaders, or do leaders ride
inexorable waves of socially-determined force and direction? Do we know
what we're doing when we try to act in historically determinative ways?
Or is a complex, mysterious, incalculable, and ungovernable stew of
individual action and decision (and inaction and indecision) the driving
force of history?

Monday, February 20, 2012

The most notable trend at this year's SF Writers Conference (SFWC) was the sea change in how industry professionals across the spectrum are talking about self-publishing.

Advice
on self-publishing was fragmented and tentative at the past two SFWCs,
in February 2010 and 2011, respectively. Some editors and agents
suggested that a self-published book that sold 5000 copies might whet a
publisher's appetite; others warned that less than 5000 copies sold
would likely kill interest in a book; still others insisted that a book
that has been self-published is a dead project as far as the New York
houses are concerned ... but the track record of a self-published book
might influence a decision to acquire a subsequent project -- for better
or worse.

This past weekend, at the SFWC 2012 held at the Mark Hopkins Hotel on Nob Hill, the story was nearly uniform.

Michael Larson, who co-organizes the SFWC and co-leads Larson-Pomada Literary Agents with his wife Elizabeth Pomada, said in an opening address, that "self-publishing may be the best option for you, if only to test-market your book, to see if it works."

Jennifer Enderlin of St. Martin's Press was unequivocal: There's no publisher who would be turned off by a self-published book that sold well.

Agent Dan Lazar: "I look at them [self-published books] as a manuscript." In fact, when I pitched my own novel, Consequence, to Mr. Lazar on Sunday, he had beside him a self-published (print) book written by a young writer I'd met two days before.

The voices of those who have been helping authors self publish for years & years (Joel Friedlander) or run self-publishing companies (Mark Coker of Smashwords, Brian Felson of BookBaby, Jesse Potash of PubSlush) are sounding louder.

In
responding to a question during a panel discussion yesterday about the
"stigma" of self-publishing, Joel Friedlander responded, "Stigma? It exists primarily inside unpublished writers"
... and Friedlander went on to assert that it is diminishing even
there. That assertion resonates with the tenor of conversations I had
with nearly all the writers I spoke with over the weekend.

"The times have changed," Mark Coker said, agreeing with Friedlander. He credited successful independently-published authors such as Amanda Hocking and John Locke (no, not the 17th century philosopher),
who have set an example of the reach successful indie-publishing can
attain. The Smashwords founder went on to assert that becoming one's own
publisher has moved "from the option of last resort to the option of first resort for some writers."

Informative
guidance on the what and the how of self-publishing are all over the
intertubes, but a place to start for interested authors might be the
guides written by Coker:

The Smashwords Style Guide
is focused on formatting requirements for publishing on that platform,
but also gives a writer a clear idea of the kinds of complexities in a
digital manuscript that would likely stymie conversion to e-book formats
on any platform or using any conversion software.

The Smashwords Book Marketing Guide
offers 30 DIY marketing suggestions that are applicable to any writer;
some of them will strike writers as obvious, some are less so.

Smashwords
is all about e-books; PubSlush and BookBaby bridge the print- / e-book
divide. For a novelist (a subspecies of writers of some personal
interest), printed books are a connundrum: it's nearly impossible for an
individual to place her/his books widely in brick-and-mortar stores.
PubSlush claims it has distribution into brick-and-mortar stores through
Ingram,
a major distributor to independent bookstores, but it's a very new
venture, independent bookstores are widely perceived to be on the ropes,
and there's still the matter of convincing widely distributed buyers to
place orders and keep a debut title on store shelves.

Does all
that imply debut novelists ought to be thinking only in terms of e-book
publication, at least until a book is proven in the e-marketplace? Some
think so. I'm not so sure, but I also know I don't have room for too
many cases of printed books in my livingroom.

Questions about
what it all means for this unpublished novelist were ricocheting around
my head all weekend at SFWC 2012. I suppose time will tell ... but in a
world of diminishing advances and marketing budgets, a world in which
only 7% of "traditionally published" books sell more than 1000 copies,
it's fair to say that writers are taking a close look at value that
large New York houses offer to authors in exchange for contracts that
limit both royalties for and ownership of our work.

I
can still say this: I would much rather have an agent to steer me
through the thicket than go it alone. So far as I can tell, it's pretty
much all quicksand out there.

Thursday, February 16, 2012

We had guests last weekend, both of them richly educated in languages
and linguistics. This is what happens when you work for a university,
you make friends with people who know stuff. Knowing stuff leads to
conversations interesting enough to think about later, and perhaps even
to blog about. Quod erat demonstrandum, or Q.E.D. as we who don't speak Latin like to say, acronymically.

A--,
one of our friends, fell to describing linguistic semantics after
dinner on Friday. Linguistic semantics is, more or less, the study of
what people mean when they say stuff. Or write it.

This is a
field of academic study, you ask? Yes indeed it is. See, deriving
meaning from stuff people say is not so simple as you might think. A--,
who is not a linguistic semanticist himself but does credible
post-prandial impersonations, demonstrated the complexity of mapping
formal meaning to spoken sentences with an example. The example he gave
is situated in a classroom, a setting that comes to mind easily among
those who work at universities. The statement:

Every student in this class speaks two languages.

Straightforward, right? A model of simple clarity: subject, verb, object. See? You too can play the linguistic semantics game.

But wait. What does this statement mean? Let's express it as a quasi-formal logical statement:

There are two languages, such that each student in this class speaks both of them.

Right. As in, for example, every student in the class speaks French, and every student in the class also speaks Japanese.

Or ... wait a minute ... do we mean something else by these words? Something like:

Each student in this class speaks two languages, but it is not necessarily true that each student speaks the same two languages.

That
is, Peter, Bob, Jane, and Sue speak French and Japanese. Sally and Tim
speak Spanish and German. Rory speaks Gaelic and Mandarin Chinese. (Me? I
speak English. C'est tout. So I guess I'm not in the class.)

Which is it, then? What's meant when a person says, Every student in this class speaks two languages? Or is it the case that these words alone are insufficient to determine what's meant?

A
linguistic semanticist codifies structural patterns in language that
define meaning sharply from purely linguistic cues, or that lead to
ambiguities like the one just illustrated.

As A-- described this
business of mapping formal meaning to language -- of determining which
formally logical statements are conveyed by this or that type of
statement in human languages -- I grew antsy. I'm not convinced it makes
sense to map formally logical statements to statements humans make in
human languages. Why not? Because I'm of the opinion that very few
people think in formally logical terms when they speak. In short, people
aren't that precise.

I mean, have you been watching the G.O.P. presidential debates?

Theories
that purport to formalize matters as nuanced as human effort to express
and understand tend to strike me as reductionist. They take for granted
a set of assumptions that simplify away key elements of a problem,
elements that are central to the question at hand.

Take, for an
example of simplifying assumptions, frictionless planes described in
introductory physics courses and textbooks. Sure, frictionless planes
make Newtonian laws of motion easier to construct as equations and
solve, but they don't actually describe the world as it exists.

I
am neither a semanticist nor a linguist, let alone a linguistic
semanticist, so best to turn to the hive mind to find some more
authoritative pronouncement than my own babbling on the topic of
complexity and nuance in language. The hive mind, as all good
intertubers know, is available to all of us on Google's home page. In response to my query, the hive mind suggests the university textbook Linguistic Semantics: An Introduction, by Sir John Lyons (Cambridge University Press, 1995). Here's what Sir John has to say:

Most language-utterences, whether spoken or written, depend for their
interpretation -- to a greater or less [sic] degree -- upon the context
in which they are used. And included within the context of an utterance,
it must not be forgotten, are the ontological beliefs of the
participants: many of these will be culturally determined and, though
normally taken for granted, can be challenged or rejected. The vast
majority of natural-language utterances, actual and potential, have a
far wider range of meanings, or interpretations, than first occur to us
when they are put to us out of context. This is a point which is not
always given due emphasis by semanticists.

I couldn't have
said it better myself, though I might have aimed at greater concision
and a less ornate style. Put it this way: it's complicated.

For some years I worked in an administrative office at UC Berkeley called Staff Equity and Diversity Services.
We were all about facilitating communication among staff and faculty
across breathtaking ranges of cultures, native languages, lifestyles,
class positions, educational backgrounds, and other
perspective-inflecting qualities. One of our favorite buzzwords --
buzzphrases, I guess -- was shared meaning. Communication between colleagues, we believed, has to establish shared meaning to be effective and conducive to sustained, mutually respectful work relationships.

What did we mean by shared meaning?
We meant the result of an involved, iterative, carefully self-conscious
process by which a listener tries to understand not just what a
speaker's words would mean if they were spoken from the listener's frame of reference, but what they mean from the speaker's
frame of reference. This is harder than you might think. It requires
that both parties do some non-trivial, time-consuming work to understand
frames of reference that may be quite foreign to them.

It's a lot harder than jumping to conclusions about implied meaning.

There's
apparently a sort of linguistic semantics that accounts for this
approach to understanding communication via spoken and written language.
It's called pragmatics. Courtesy of our other guest of last
weekend, Q--, I have skimmed (I won't claim to have read, let alone
fully grokked) Ruth Kempson's chapter titled Pragmatics: Language and Communication in The Blackwell Handbook of Linguistics. From that chapter:

According to Grice, who was the pioneer of the inferential approach to
conversation (Grice 1975), there is a general assumption underpinning
all utterance interpretation that the interpretation of utterances is a
collaborative enterprise guided by a "co-operative principle" in which a
speaker and hearer are engaged in some shared goal.

To me that sounds a lot closer to real-world efforts to match words with meaning.

But ... can we go back to implied meaning for just a moment? Just for fun?

Last month a Facebook friend shared a link from Gawker (thanks, Elliot!). It summarized a post by Jake Adelstein on the Japan Subculture Research Center's website. The post featured photos snapped by Zarina Yamaguchi at a department store in Osaka; the post was titled It’s no ordinary sale. It’s a FUCKIN’ SALE! The image says it all (at right).

Those signs in the department store beg a certain question, don't they? What (on Earth) did the marketing department mean when they characterized storewide discounts of 20% as a Fuckin' Sale?

Monday, February 13, 2012

I wrote last month about my recent trip home from Santa Cruz to Berkeley, California, along the coast of San Mateo County. On my way down a few days before that I stopped at Pebble Beach, just south of the town of Pescadero. Good reasons to stop at Pebble Beach include the eponymous pebbles, lovely ice plant (see photo at right), the tidepools, and the dramatic white surf crashing over craggy, black stone. Most of all, though, Pebble Beach is known for the tafoni carved into the sandstone, no one quite knows how. (Cf. Jon Boxman's website, http://www.tafoni.com, for a wealth of information and citations about tafoni.)

Here's how a sign posted by the California Department of Parks and Recreation describes the tafoni at Pebble Beach:

Tafoni are created by a process called "cavernous weathering." This is the interaction of salt spray and wind on the rock.

The rock here consists of the mudstones, siltstones, and sandstones of the Pigeon Point Formation. Tafoni form best in sandstone because it is soft and porous.

Our wet winters and long, dry summers set the stage for the complex process that has carved intricate patterns in these rocks over hundreds of thousands of years."

I came to know Pebble Beach when I was a teenager, when my family came to this part of California's coast with friends and colleagues and families of friends and colleagues. I spent hours here in my 20s taking photographs of the rocks. You can stare at these forms for hours, and see all manner of creatures in them. As the Parks and Recreation sign suggests, "Use your imagination as you explore. See if you can find a dragonfly or a crocodile." I still have prints of those vintage nineteen-eighty-something photos, and might even be able to dig up the negatives if I tried ... but instead I'll share a few of the born-digital images and video I shot several days into this new year:

Here's a bit of video that puts these strange formations in their native context, and gives a sense of the drama of this stretch of the San Mateo County coast:

You could easily miss the turnoff into Pebble Beach; keep your eyes peeled, and don't be fooled by the sign that emphasizes that Pebble Beach is a part of "Bean Hollow State Beach," bureaucratically speaking; Bean Hollow is also the name of a beach about a mile further south.

The conference will be held on Presidents Day Weekend, 16-19 February, at the Mark Hopkins Hotel. There's an impressive array of speakers, and seventy-five currently scheduled sessions and keynotes. The conference has sold out, but there's a waiting list if you're inspired to make a last-minute attempt to attend. There are also SFWC Master Classes offered on Monday 20 February, for which enrollment is still open.

Like last year, after reading through the listed sessions I was curious about the big picture view of what's on offer at SFWC. Since I have last year's categorization readily at hand, from last year's blog post, I have compiled counts of sessions in the same categories (almost) that I used last year, for comparison.

(For the record, by "almost" I mean that this year I broke out poetry into its own category, rather than grouping it with "Miscellaneous" sessions; to keep the comparison honest, I broke out last year's poetry-oriented session count in the new category as well.)

Et voilà:

Category

2012 Sessions

2011 Sessions

The industry: how it works, how to work it

18

13

Promotion (platform building, etc.)

14

15

Fiction (adult or general)

8

15

Craft and practice of writing

7

9

Poetry

7

3

Self-publishing, E-books

6

4

Books for kids and young adults

6

7

Non-fiction

3

7

Miscellaneous

6

2

Total

75

73

Same disclaimer as last year: Others might count some of the sessions differently than I did, and some would come up with different categories. Since the 'raw data' is the publicly posted schedule, readers are free to come up with their own schemes ... I'd be interested to see other slices and dices in comments to this post.

Like last year, I've used Wordle to generate a word cloud (see image, click to enlarge) from the SFWC schedule. Input to this year's word cloud was limited to session names, so the cloud gives a sense of the content of the sessions without the clutter of the presenters' names (I included names in last year's Wordle). No offense intended to the presenters, natch.

The big trends I'm seeing this year include an increase by more than twofold in poetry-oriented sessions, significantly more about the rapidly-morphing publishing industry, and a better-than-last-year emphasis on the new and disruptive kidz in the class, self-publishing channels and e-books. Also, interestingly, a halving of sessions oriented specifically to fiction and specifically to non-fiction; and a slight decrease in sessions aimed at the craft and practice of writing.

Six of the eight members of my on-line writers' critique group are attending this year -- traveling from as far as the midwest and Europe -- and a seventh will be returning from overseas in time to meet us for a post-conference lunch. I'm really looking forward to spending time with my circle of working writers after a year of contact limited mostly to e-mail and Skype.

Like last year, my on-line critique group will be looking for new writers to join us -- and because we communicate via the intertubes it doesn't matter where in the world new members live. If you're attending and think you might be interested, please feel welcome to seek me out; or send an e-mail ahead of time (you can find contact info on my web site). Our group's activities and guidelines are pretty close to the same as those I summarized in my post last year, How to organize an on-line writers' group; please have a look if you'd like to know more.

Monday, February 6, 2012

My friends Susan Poff and Bob Kamin were murdered on the 26th of January.

It's
a horrific tale, and I expect it to become more horrific as details
come to light. It's too much more than enough to say that their fifteen
year old son, adopted when he was six, has confessed responsibility for
their deaths. I'm not going to describe any more than that. The first article that appeared in the SF Chronicle is a place to begin for those who need to know more. Caveat lector:
as in any press coverage, and especially press coverage of lurid
events, there's more to the story than has been reported, and some of
what has been reported is flat-out wrong.

As a part of
Susan's collective household of some 14 years' duration, until 1996, I
gave one of the eulogies following Susan's and Bob's memorial mass on Friday.
Susan and I were housemates, friends, and comrades for nearly thirty
years, beginning in 1982; I knew Bob since the two of them met, in the
mid-1990s.

Susan was one of the best people I have ever
known. The only reason I don't say exactly that about Bob is because I
didn't know him as deeply as I knew Susan. Listening to his surviving
family, close friends, and colleagues on Friday made clear to all
present that Bob had a heart of gold, a deep and compassionate
intellect, an honest man's humility, and wisdom that would require a
lesser person lifetimes to accrue.

I
met Susan in the summer of 1982, when I moved into a house full of
people I didn't know. Vera too, lived on Ward Street, and Joanie soon
joined us, then Michael. With a few detours here and there, the five of
us made our home together until 1996.

When I moved into that
first of our houses, on Ward Street, I took the room where Beth and Glen
had been living. Jon lived in the upstairs flat next-door, which became
our household's second abode; now Jon extends our family into the Loire
Valley.

Karen moved into the downstairs flat, and became a part
of us. I met Eric -- who lives in London now but has been in touch all
week and is here in mind and heart -- and he too joined our burgeoning
clan.

Jon and Joanie brought little Emma into our family when she
was a puppy. During the year Susan and Joanie spent in New York, Emma
hobbled along with them on her three little legs.

Many others of
you lived with us for part of that time. You have been friends,
neighbors, comrades -- all of us part of an extended family these past
thirty years. I won't try to name each of you who are part of we.

Our
chosen family blended with our birth families. Susan's brother David
stayed with us on weekends when he was in the Maritime Academy; my
brother David stayed with us for a summer. Joanie's cousin Eric lived
with us on Valle Vista Avenue. Michael's brother Eamon and his cousin
Kevin lived with us on 54th Street.

Susan and Joanie and Vera
were high school classmates, at Bishop Montgomery in Torrance. Years
later, Susan's brother David and Joanie's brother Steve were partners in
the Torrance Police Department.

Our family's ties were complicated -- long before Facebook made it a relationship status.

Like
any family, our bonds remained strong over the years since we last
shared a home. These bonds, like the bonds of any family, are
fundamental relationships in our lives. This was powerfully true for
Susan.

Had last week's incomprehensible tragedy been averted,
Joanie and her husband Jeff would have moved into the house on Athol
Avenue later this year, and a part of our family would have reunited
under a single roof.

* * *

In
the family we made together, Susan was the sister who would move heaven
and earth to help any one of us. And she didn't stop there. A friend of
a friend; comrades in the many struggles for social justice to which
she lent herself, body and soul; the many, many women, men, and children
who relied on her work as a medical caregiver.

All of you know this. Everyone who knew Susan knew her compassion, her dedication, her loyalty.

I
only met Josh Bamberger outside the church this afternoon, before the
mass; Susan worked for Josh in San Francisco's Department of Public
Health. Among the quotes from Susan's friends, family, and colleagues in
the press this week, Dr. Bamberger's words in the Oakland Tribune rang
truest to me. He said,

"I've never met anyone who lived with
as little ambivalence about making the world a better place. She was one
of the most loving, heartfelt, solid and wise persons who ever cared
for people living in poverty."

* * *

Susan
wanted to raise children. For a time our household made plans to have
and raise children together, but that didn't happen. When Susan and Bob
were unable to conceive, and decided to adopt, they resolved together to
give a chance to some child who otherwise would have none.

That's the kind of person Susan was. That's the kind of people Susan and Bob were.

It
is the tragedy that defines our staggering loss of last week that Susan
and Bob tried to save a child whose darkest depths they never guessed
at -- no one did, none of us. A child, it seems now, who was broken
beyond our understanding.

* * *

I
had the privilege of Susan's friendship for nearly thirty years. I knew
Bob for little more than half that time, but I share his heritage, and
that goes back a long way.

Susan and Bob both lived their lives
in the spirit of Tikkun Olam, a Hebrew phrase that means "repairing the
world." Each of them sought in so many ways to repair the world. To heal
the sick and comfort the afflicted: these were the guiding principles
of each of their lives, and of their life together.

In a prayer
called the Aleinu, a prayer some attribute to the biblical Joshua, we
express this hope: L'takken olam b'malkhut Shaddai, "to perfect the
world under God's sovereignty."

For Susan and for Bob the goal
was, perhaps, less utopian than that. Less about perfection, and more
about bringing their compassionate humanity into every place they lived
and loved.

* * *

Each of us here today mourns Susan's and Bob's absence. Each of us feels a void Susan and Bob filled.

Yet
we have also been enriched by each of them. And that enrichment ...
that's ours to keep. Ours to keep, and ours to pass along.

We each have their example to set before ourselves, their example of lives lived well and righteously.

The light of Susan's and Bob's lives will burn bright and long for those who bear their spirits forward.

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About Steve

I write fiction, take an activist interest in politics and culture, and work in information technology at UC Berkeley. My novel Consequence was judged Best General Fiction in the 2017 Green Book Festival competition; please visit my website for more info. ~Steve